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Monday, July 30, 2012

1st Qualifier for 2013 F3F French Team

Last week-end was the first qualilfication contest for the team who will represent France in Slovakia for the European championship. The french qualification is based on the National championship (May 26 to 28th 2012), the FAI of Briançon (July 21 to 22th 2012). A second qualifier will be organised mid september. The 3 best results (with ponderation based on the number of rounds in each contest) for each pilot are kept to determine the ranking.


This 1st qualifier was on a new F3F spot, at the border between Italy and France, north to Monaco. We booked the Saturday and Sunday, just in case, but the objective was to finish on Saturday. We met around midday, and at the briefing, we decided to have 15 rounds maximum, in order to better balance the final results.

We managed the 15 rounds in 4 hours, with 8 pilots. This was possible only because of generous people who did the base judges and CDs during the whole afternoon. A huge "thank you" to them !

The slope was very homogeneous  with time between 34s and 45s, but most of the time, the difference between the best time and the worse time was around 5s.

The landing was a bit problematic and was needing to be very precise to avoid stones and rocks here and there. I found a small area with grass, and no rotor at the second round and I did the 14 landings there.
After doing my best time in the very first round with a 35s flying my Pike Precision, I had a hard landing, hopefully with no damages apart few scratch on the fuselage. So I switched to the Needle 100 to not take more risk with the Pike. It has been a semi-suprise to do so well with the Needle againts some FS4, Alliaj HM during 12 rounds. I flew it empty (2600g) all the time, and had to switch back to the Pike when the wind decreased temporarely.

There were plenty of Sub-40s during the contest, and personnaly, I did 13 sub-40s over the 15 rounds, and many 37s or even 36,99, so my new surname was Mr "37" during the week-end.


In the evening we had a very nice BBQ at Denis's house, before to camp there. We returned home on Sunday, with a long road through Italy and French alps.

Overall, I'm very please with the result, which was a good practice session for the preparation of Rügen. The Col de Tende will be definitively on contest of the french league next year, becuase this spot is so promising !!!

Below is a small video I did on Saturday.

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